Zen, Jazz and The Art of Skateboarding

On John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, skating and meditation

One of the first skate videos I ever saw was The Search for Animal Chin.

It was quite a cheesy story about five young dudes who were looking for this mystical man – part Zen master, part legendary skater.

Of course Animal Chin didn’t actually exist. Chasing him around iconic spots in Hawaii and California, the boys still found what they were actually looking for – the essential spirit of skateboarding.

Admittedly, that film from 1987 didn’t age well.

Four years later, Spike Jonze’s classic Video Days came out.

It contains a famous section of the influential skater Mark Gonzales, edited to the sounds of “Traneing In” by John Coltrane and the Red Garland Trio.

There’s a scene in Larry Clark’s 1995 movie Kids set in a Manhattan apartment full of skaters hanging out, smoking weed and watching that specific Video Days part on a TV set.

Back in the days, I spent countless hours in similar settings, watching these skate videos over and over again. They massive influenced and shaped my taste in music and visual arts.

Some just featured straightforward skate footage, but others incorporated experimental editing, weird animations and transitions without any actual skating.

The skaters in those videos weren’t just successful athletes to me.

I’m talking about people like Mark Gonzales, Neil Blender, Ed Templeton, Jason Lee or Ethan Fowler.

These guys weren’t trying to fit in. They were proud outsiders.

For me and my friends, they were role models in terms of their taste and lifestyle, how they dressed and talked, and of course the music they listened to.

I discovered so much music through skate video soundtracks – even John Coltrane, whom I first heard in Video Days.

Which brings us to how I learned about A Love Supreme.

In 1995, the filmmaker and visual artist Thomas Campbell created a promo video for the New York City skateboarding store Supreme.

Setting casual black-and-white footage of downtown skaters like Keith Hufnagel, Quim Cardona and Peter Bici to the transcendental music of Coltrane’s 1965 masterpiece, Campbell created a timeless piece of video art.

This film is not about the level of tricks shown. Just like Animal Chin, it aims to capture the pure communal joy of skateboarding, removed from its competitive and commercial aspects – that moment you’re feeling the tailwind on your skin on a warm summer day, rolling down a city street.

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme just turned 60; it’s widely seen as one of the foundational documents of what we call ‘spiritual jazz‘ today. That album was my gateway into the more adventurous side of jazz music.

One aspect that’s often repeated is how it’s not even a performance, but more of an invocation, or a prayer.

It’s interesting that I discovered this musical prayer through a skate video – a marketing film for a store that would turn into one of the world’s biggest fashion brands – but at the same time, it feels quite apt.

Skating and jazz music, with its heavy focus on improvisation, have always embodied a similar quality to me, one that I would later rediscover in Zen meditation.

They would guide me to mindful presence and awareness. Unoccupied with the past or the future, I stopped following the senseless chatter of my monkey mind, and just surrendered to the moment.

To this day, I react like one of Pavlov’s dogs when I hear that unmistakable crunching noise of polyurethane wheels on concrete – or that opening gong and Elvin Jones’ cymbal washes on A Love Supreme.